Eyeing Up
Do you trust me? I promise we’re going somewhere good. But today’s blog is going to require us to travel through some muck in order to get there. Ready? Don’t overthink it. Here we go.
Robin Hood. Not the brand of all-purpose flour, but rather the character from Sherwood Forest. In the Disney version, he was a sly fox, and quite handsome, as far as cartoon foxes go.
Robin Hood was known for robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. Told ya there was going to be muck. This is the part of the story where things could get political, but fear not, I’m not political and this is not a political piece, though we have arrived at our first destination.
So let’s think about Robin Hood, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. Did you automatically put yourself in the poor column? Were you eyeing up all the stuff the rich folk were going to start sending your way? I did. I associate, fit in, and, let’s face it, I identify as poor. But I’m not poor. I have all the stuff I need: water, food, shelter. I even have cable—some kind of internet app thing, but it works like cable. And I have a cat and a dog who rely on me for their own food and shelter and belly rubs. I’m doing alright.
In the grand scheme of things, they say there’s always someone with more than you, and by the same token, there’s always somebody with less. As we eye up something that we’d like to have, someone else is eyeing up what we already have. And maybe all these things are just things, or maybe they’re blessings. Regardless, the trick is to stop comparing. And thus, we’ve landed at our second stop.
Golden Girls fans out there might recall the episode where Dorothy says she was in the teachers’ lounge talking with the other female teachers, chatting away, and she just felt like one of the girls. Then she went out to her car to drive home and saw herself in the rearview mirror. “An old woman was staring back at me,” she says. Which prompts Rose to ask, “Who?”
Anyway, I’ve had lots of these moments lately where I feel like I fit in with friends and family members much younger than I am. And I do fit in. But when I start comparing myself to them is when I get lost. The thing is, I’m not going to lose weight as fast, or build muscle as fast, and my dermatologist says I can’t be in the sun so much, so no pretty summer tans for this girl anymore. (All that said, I’m trying not to picture myself as a pillowy-dumpy-pale writer. But alas, too late.) A friend of mine recently said you reach a certain age and there’s nothing exciting anymore. I pointed out that it’s just a different kind of excitement. Do I eat my fiber cereal or have some leftover pizza for breakfast? The answer will certainly create some excitement.
And finally, we’ve reached our destination. To envy what someone else has, whether a possession or an age (or one and the same as my friend Francesca will tell you, “In Italy we possess our age,”) is to leave yourself behind, as if you didn’t matter or you’re not enough, as if your experiences and walking in your own shoes all this way along life’s crazy path didn’t count for anything when, in fact, these things counted for everything. The moment I realized I’m not these other people was the moment I resumed being me. All of the pale, writerly, cheerleader-y, full of experiences and fiber, story-telling Me.
It’s good to be back.
